August 27 - Activist Technology: A discussion of the essays of Jon Lebkowsky (Virtual Bonfire: A Brief History of Activist Technology) pages 267 - 275, Jay Rosen (The Weblog: An Extremely Democratic Form of Journalism), pages 104 – 110, Britt Blaser (The Revolution Will Be Engineered: An Assessment of the Present and Possible Future of Net-based Political Tools) pages 276 – 295

September 17 (Constitution Day) - Future of Democracy: A discussion among the participants

How to Participate: Join each session at http://67.19.90.10/masteradmin/room.asp?id=rs36a886a07b55. Allow a few extra minutes the first time you attend to download the necessary software. A PC is required. Broadband Internet access is preferable. If you wish to join in the conversations verbally, a PC microphone is required. (Text messaging is also available.) No password is required for these sessions. Login with the name you'd like to be known by in the session.

Archive: All of the programs and the Extreme Democracy blog will be archived. The audio, text messages and video of each session will be recorded and available on the Texas Fourm web site.

Sponsors: The Central Texas Chapter of the World Future Society (www.centexwfs.org) and Texas Forums (www.texasforums.org) , an initiative of the LBJ Library (www.lbjlib.utexas.edu) , are sponsoring this series of seminars in cooperation with Jon Lebkowsky and Mitch Ratcliffe of the Extreme Democracy (www.extremedemocracy.com) project.

July 24, 2007

Networks

“Diversity plus freedom creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality.”
Clay Shirky

Power law

N = c/n

What factors control the rank?
When is the power law important?
When is the power law not important?

Traditional democracy does not scale well from small to large groups.
Networked society is not constrained by geography.
Extreme democracy takes place in real time.

“Failure to scale is evident when people feel disenfranchised, when they no longer have sufficient contact or interaction with their government to see their wishes reflected in its actions.”
Mitch Ratcliffe

Politicians express this disconnect by seeing only their own well being, sacrificing the common good for their own benefit at the expense of others.”

“Rule of 150”

“Mohandas K. Gandhi said, ‘One cannot unite a community without newspaper or journal of some kind.’ These separate trends of individual expression through blogs, an egalitarian journalism, and organized online activism are waking unrecognized communities of interest that will confound a political system designed for representation geographic constituencies. A concerted effort by the peoples of the world can transform the perception of the means and ends of government. Meanwhile, politics, the art of participation in social decision-making and a practice closely related to being "polite," which leans to achieve refinement, continues to function essentially as it has throughout history, through debate and compromise among people.”
Mitch Ratcliffe

“An answer to the continuing debate about political process will be based the integration of many, though not all, threads in recent human development into an expanded concept of the individual as the basis for the concept of sovereignty and the redefinition of the role of government institutions in order to revitalize political processes. A political philosophy must incorporate more than the experience of participation. An analysis of power, definite ideas about the role of the citizen and the government, and the principles society will embrace about the value of the individual are required, as well. Extreme democracy seeks to provide these foundational ideas to place the thrill of emergent organizations into socio-political context.”
Mitch Ratcliffe